Hmm... Mabye it's time to enlist some outside help...

Vaergoth

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 24, 2002
Messages
9
I want to make something perfectly clear before I go any further.

I am in NO way authorized to make decisions or pass judgment on the Civ 3 mod comunity. I have only had the game for about 2 weeks at the most and have NEVER truly created a worthwhile mod, for any game. In other words, I have no right to be posting this right now. But I'm going to anyways.

Recently, I've been looking around the Civ 3 data structure a little. It's amazing the level of customization that is readily availible. It's very rare to find a game that uses mostly uncompressed data, which is just ripe for the editing.

Unfortunatly, manual file swapping is a real hassle. Who wants to rename and move a bunch of files, just for a few new lines of text? Well, I might have the answer.

By suggesting this, I kinda feel like I'm infringing on someone's territory (IE: Gramphos). Nevertheless, There is an experienced team of programers who have made similar programs for other games (like starcraft). Wherever they went, they changed the face of game editing, and legion has been accomplished that would not have been without them. I don't know if they'l co-operate, or if we need them, but I'm sure they could help develop a tool just as powerful as their ones for starcraft, but for civ 3.

I'm talking, of course, about Camelot Systems. If you've ever been anywhere near the starcraft editing scene, you've heard of them. Within that community, they are all but gods.

Again, I don't want to suggest a move onto someone's turf, but mabye we should ask for a little help from the pros?

http://www.camsys.org/forums/view_board.php?id=2
 
Forget it. This was a mistake.

Just know this: If anyone has trouble or wants help creating Civ 3 Mod Tools, you know where to go.
 
Update - In my most recent excursion to the camsys forums, I recived this reply:

If your goal is a patching system like StarDraft or MPQDraft, then here's my suggestions on the operations of the Patch Creator:

1.) Create the interface that allows selection of which files should be patched.

2.) Add function to the interface so that the replacement files are imported.

3.) Somewhere along here you should have a compression algorithm to decrease the size of the generated patch. This can either be done as the files are imported or done at the very end of the process when the EXE file is generated.

4.) The last step, and the hardest, is the creation of the self-executing patch file. The program needs to be able to generate EXEs which temporarily rename the default game files to other names, and then extracts the replacement files which are embedded into the EXE to the appropriate directories. The last thing it has to do is simply launch the game.


That's about all I could get, the rest is up to whoever decides to take up the project.
 
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